$10M grant to help fix flood district waterways
2016 Tax Day barrage socked agency with $65M in infrastructure damage
Devastating floods in April 2016 damaged thousands of buildings and homes around Houston and left eight people dead.
Less known is that the network of bayous and waterways around Houston, many built and maintained to control floodwaters themselves, also took a pounding, and officials still are working to repair the damage.
Harris County Commissioners Court this week accepted nearly $10 million in grant funds from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, money they hope can help repair eroded waterways, cracked concrete lining and damaged culverts.
In all, the Tax Day floods caused more than $65 million in damage to flood control infrastructure, Harris County Flood Control District Director of Operations Matt Zeve said.
“We’ve made many submittals to many people. This is the first of, hopefully, more grants and reimbursements to help us recover from the Tax Day flood,” Zeve said.
The damage from the floods was a significant hit for the district, which every year stretches a limited budget to try to cope with severe storms in a floodprone county.
Zeve said the flood control district has roughly $100 million in its maintenance backlog, and spends about $9 million to $12 million on maintenance each year. That means that over time the district has gotten behind on its upkeep.
The city of Houston also grapples with a maintenance backlog. In the wake of the spring 2016 storms, Mayor Sylvester Turner created a “storm water action team” that would target 22 maintenance projects across the city — replacing sewer inlets, grates, regrading ditches, among other fixes — with $10 million.
Events like the Tax Day flood compound the problem. In late April 2016, more than 240 billion gallons of water rained down across the county, particularly in the northwest, resulting in one of the most devastating storms in Houston’s history.
Zeve said damage was done to waterways in near-
ly every watershed across the county. To estimate the damage, the flood control district took high resolution aerial photos of the county after the Tax Day flood and compared the photos to those taken before the storm, eventually coming up with the $65 million figure.
The damage includes major erosion to Cypress Creek, Little Cypress Creek and Upper Langham Creek, Zeve said.
The nearly $10 million grant from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service was matched by nearly $3 million in flood control district funds. Zeve said the district is working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to seek more funds, and said the USDA could provide more.
“We’re constantly working with them, locally and in Washington, D.C.,” he said. “We’re constantly working with all those agencies at the federal level and the local level.”
Repairing eroded bayous, Zeve said, could protect bridges, water lines, sewer lines, gas lines and telecommunication lines, that run along or under the waterways.
Without the fixes, Zeve said, erosion will “keep getting worse.”
“Every time it rains, something else breaks,” he said. “It’s constant.”